Often considered one of the most beautiful women to appear on film, Lamarr began her career as Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler, and by the age of 19, she had graced four films before starring in 1933's Ecstasy, a German feature shot in Prague and Vienna.
Ecstasy was based on a script of only five pages and was the first non-pornographic film to portray a woman having an orgasm. Yet the 19-year-old running nude through a field, skinny dipping and experiencing sexual passion for the first time was actually 17 years old. Kiesler had lied about her age to get the part.
That same year, Hedy married Friedrich Mandl, a wealthy arms manufacturer and prominent Fascist who rubbed elbows with both Hitler and Mussolini. He forbid his wife to act and bought up most every copy of Ecstasy. Draped in all the jewelry Mandl had given her, Kiesler fled the marriage to Paris disguised as her maid.
Her next stop? Hollywood. Kiesler set sail from London on a ship that also had Louis B. Mayer aboard. While Ecstasy had been banned in the U.S., Mayer had seen the film and was intrigued by its sultry star. He offered her a contract at MGM, and Hedy Kiesler became Hedy Lamarr.
Lamarr often portrayed the smoldering seductress, most notably in Samson and Delilah. But despite her mesmerizing beauty and talent, her greatest accomplishment would not be on the screen.
In 1940, Lamarr was dismayed to hear reports of German U-boats torpedoing civilian ships. Using information she had learned as the wife of an arms dealer, listening in on meetings with scientists and technology experts, Lamarr devised a communications system called "frequency hopping," so a ship's frequency--and it's location--could not be detected. Lamarr partnered with American composer and pianist George Antheil to develop and patent this new technology. Unfortunately, the U.S. military did not employ it until the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.
Today, Lamarr's "frequency hopping" is known is "spread spectrum" and is the basis for our wi-fi and GPS technology. Of course, there's a lot more to it, but I'm really not the person to try and explain it all.
While I had planned this to be just a brief piece about Ecstasy, it's impossible to write about Lamarr without noting her incredible contribution to society. And there's more. Lamarr was fluent in nine languages, married six times and arrested for shoplifting twice. She turned down the leads in both Gaslight and Casablanca. She was the inspiration for Catwoman. And she died in relative obscurity in Orlando, FL in 2000.
Said The Most Beautiful Woman in Films, "Any girl can be glamorous. All you have to do is stand still and look stupid."
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